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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/30125727">To Echo And Repeat</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/garbageshedinja/pseuds/garbageshedinja'>garbageshedinja</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Danny Phantom</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Danny and Vlad Bonded Offscreen Just Trust me, Gen, Identity Reveal, Not Phantom Planet Compliant (Danny Phantom)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 02:28:11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,715</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/30125727</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/garbageshedinja/pseuds/garbageshedinja</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>As it turns out, Vlad and Danny are dead. They have been for a while. Jack and Maddie killed them, years ago. And, as it turns out, neither of them are even mad about it. </p><p>Alternatively:<br/>Sometime you find out you killed your best friend and your youngest child, and you just kind of have to deal with that.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>142</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Maddie</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>So, there's actually a very good reason that Vlad and Danny are telling the Fentons that they're half-ghosts together, but that explanation is in a fic that is no where near done and that I may have cursed myself into not finishing by even mentioning. In the meantime, have the internal reactions of Jack and Maddie.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“I forgive you.” Danny says. He says it easily. Like he doesn’t have to think about it. Like they dropped a mug or burnt dinner. He says those words and he means it. Danny is dead, dead, dead, because of a mistake his parents made, and he doesn’t hold it against them.</p><p>He’s also alive. Maddie knows that. She knows that he has a sluggish pulse and a temperature far below hypothermic. She knows that his blood still pumps and his lungs still take in air. He is alive. But he is a ghost. Danny tells his parents he forgives them but his feet don’t touch the ground.</p><p>Vlad says the words “I forgive you.” His body language tells Maddie that he does not. The words sound like they’re being punched out of him. Like it takes him physical effort to say it. Maddie knows that he does not forgive them. Jack, more specifically. But he says the words and bows his head and asks for their forgiveness in return.</p><p>Vlad and Danny are not the same. Phantom can at least claim to have always been trying to help. Just a kid with power beyond his own imagining trying to keep his town safe. But Plasmius is no hero. Plasmius destroys what he wants, steals, terrifies humans simply because he can. Plasmius has hurt them, has tried to kill Jack and kidnap her on more than one occasion.</p><p>Plasmius and Phantom are the same, because they are both half-dead. Jack and Maddie Fenton had a hand in killing both of them.</p><p>Years ago, decades even, Vlad Masters was one of their closest friends. Vlad took research into ecto-entities seriously. He listened to her, he listened to Jack, and he did not run away. He and Jack had been roommates, and Maddie had envied the easy camaraderie between them.</p><p>When Maddie thought back, past that last terrible day, she thought of Vlad’s long nights working on grant proposals. She thought of the day she’d almost cried because they didn’t have access to the materials they needed, and how Vlad shown up with them mere hours later, haggard and red, but with every last screw and bolt and odd bit of circuitry he could get his hands on, more than enough for the proto-portal. She thought of the shy boy who found his spine when someone insulted Jack Fenton, of how the first time she’d ever seen Vlad angry he was shouting down someone who had made fun of Jack. Vlad had, at one point, been a dear devoted friend. It did not take much thought for Maddie to know why that had changed.</p><p>The man in front of her had done terrible things. He had, by his own admission, spent a good portion of her son’s teenage years beating him senseless. He had amassed his wealth through stealing companies, he had haunted his home state so often that he had been well known to the Fentons as Plasmius before they ever reconnected with Masters. He had possessed the voters of Amity Park so that he would be elected Mayor, with the express purpose of using that position to antagonize one of her children.</p><p>And yet.</p><p>And yet.</p><p>Vlad is human, but he is a ghost. Maddie doesn’t study humans. She doesn’t dislike them, but she does not study them. It simply isn’t her area of expertise. Ghosts, however? Madeline Fenton knows ghosts. So while she couldn’t speak to the human side of things, Maddie could tell a lot from the ghost half. Ghosts were heavily, heavily influenced by how they’d died. Not just the method, but the circumstances of their death. By their age, by their mental state, by what parts of their last moments stood out to them. She knew how Vlad had become Plasmius. Vlad Masters had been their best friend and they repaid him by abandoning him. True, they couldn’t visit for the first few months of the ecto-acne’s assault on Vlad’s body. But after that? There was always something else, something more important, some excuse they muttered to each other until they forgot all about him. Vlad Masters died alone in that hospital, from the wounds their invention gave him. And it was only now that her or Jack had really, truly apologized for it.</p><p>Maddie doesn’t know what that might do to a human, but she knew that those conditions would make for an angry, vengeful ghost.</p><p>It doesn’t change <em>everything</em>, or excuse his actions. Vlad’s choices were still his own, and his crimes were still his own. It does, however, make Maddie a little more willing to forgive.</p><p>Danny, her Danny, stood next to Plasmius. Stood next to Vlad Masters. Brought him into their house, past their ghosts shields, and trusted him to talk to them. And maybe that shouldn’t have meant anything to her. Danny had, in this same conversation, forgiven his parents own neglect even though it had cost him his life. But Danny knew Vlad in ways that she didn’t. This was new information to her, but he had carried all of these things with him for <em>years</em>. Danny believed that Vlad was truly apologetic. Maddie wanted to trust that.</p><p>Vlad said, “I forgive you.”</p><p>Next, he said “I’m sorry.”</p><p>He outlined his crimes. He told them of attempts on their lives that they hadn’t even noticed, of times he had manipulated them into practically handing over their son, of times he had been so blinded by his obsession that he had come with no plan at all, only the need to kill Jack and steal Maddie. He told them everything he could remember. He told them, shamefully, that there were things that he couldn’t remember. Days when he would wake up and see footage of himself fighting Phantom and have no memory of why. He told them everything. No secrets. No more hiding.</p><p>Maddie does not say she forgives him. She does not say that it is okay. She doesn’t like to lie. She does not forgive him yet. She might, one day. (Maybe when she can stop herself from wondering what he might have done if he ever succeeded. If he had killed Jack and taken her and she did not fall into his arms, what he might have done to her. She didn’t think her friend was capable of such a thing – maybe it hadn’t even occurred to him, maybe it was just a paranoid thought. But she had also thought him kind, and beyond that thought him living. Did she know enough about him to make that call?)</p><p>Jack forgives him. She knows he does. Jack is like that, has always been like that. It is a very simple problem to him. A collection  of if-then statements. Vlad has hurt them, but it is because they hurt him first. The proportions do not matter to Jack. They might, had this come out in a different way. But Vlad was here, in their home, looking ready to beg forgiveness on his knees if that was what it took. Vlad was here, in their basement, in front of their portal, with a heart that beat too slowly, and skin that burned far beyond any fever. And next to him stood their boy, someone Vlad had harmed just as much, and who trusted him implicitly. If this is true, then Vlad is sorry. If they are alive, no harm done. And in the case of Vlad and Danny, if they are dead, then something has killed them.</p><p>Jack says, “I forgive you.” Maddie can hear the choked back tears. He means it.</p><p>Vlad looks like weight has lifted off his shoulders. Danny looks hopeful. Jack looks like part of his world has shattered.</p><p>Maddie looks at Vlad and cannot say a word.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Jack</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jack Fenton is a murderer.</p><p>His wife and children would never tell him so. But he is. He knows.</p><p>Jack was always clumsy and forgetful. He was overenthusiastic about a lot of things. When things got him excited he had trouble thinking about anything else. And when it came to anything about ghosts, he could get tunnel vision. And that could lead to mistakes. It <em>did</em> lead to mistakes. Miscalculations. Malfunctioning equipment.</p><p>Two portal accidents.</p><p>Jack had always liked to say that he wasn’t an idiot. That sometimes he’d just get going before his brain could catch up with the rest of him. He wasn’t dumb, he was just stupid sometimes. And he knew he came across as dumb. That sometimes he couldn’t speak the way he wanted to. And he had never been as articulate as Vlad or Maddie. But he wasn’t an idiot. He had always, always said that. On paper he was smart. Not quite a genius. Not like his daughter clearly was. But he was <em>smart</em>. He had the degrees to prove it. Maddie had put them in a cabinet somewhere, but they were real. Tangible proof that he had a brain. Evidence that regardless of what people might say about him, he did have something going on in his skull.</p><p>Never before had they felt like mistakes.</p><p>Anyone could be clumsy. Anyone could be forgetful. Anyone could drop a beaker or lose their keys. It took someone truly special in their incompetence to ignore all warnings and fire up an experimental piece of machinery in someone’s face. It took a mindless bumbling moron to place an on/off switch on the <em>inside</em> of a dangerous piece of equipment. Only big, fat, <em>stupid</em> Jack Fenton could kill two people and go years without noticing they were dead.</p><p>Because that’s what they were. Half-alive or not, they were half-<em>dead</em>. They had died. Vlad, his best friend, and Danny, his only son. Dead. By his hand. By his idiocy. He had killed them.</p><p>Maddie had assured him that it wasn’t the case. Because she had worked on those things as much as he had, hadn’t she? But Maddie had missed something. She wasn’t stupid. And he was. Maddie hadn’t put the buttons on the inside, and Maddie hadn’t plugged in the portal. She was a bystander. At most, an accessory.</p><p>But Jack? Jack was a murderer.</p><p>And somehow, his victims tell him this in the same breath that they forgive him.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>It's shorter because Jack doesn't have as much to say, and not because I struggled with writing Jack, I promise. Scout's honor. (I was never a scout, but I assume that they have honor.)<br/>Jack is a lil bit more "This is entirely my fault" than Maddie is. Jack is very quick to forgive and very hesitant to forget his own mistakes. (And finding out about Vlad while /not/ fighting him in space certainly helps with that.)<br/>He's also being just as gung-ho in berating himself as he is with everything else. He's not really thinking about what might have happened or the consequences of what already has. As far as he's concerned, everything that's happened is his fault, regardless of his intentions or even other people's decisions to a certain extent.</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>To be clear, Maddie won't forgive Vlad for a long, long time. Even if she never forgave him, I don't think anyone would blame her. She has got some Mixed Feelings about him, and he is going to have to work hard if he wants to change that. But her boys like him, and that means she will tolerate him for now.<br/>(If he ever makes her think he's going to hurt her or her family again, he's 100% getting an ecto-scalpel through his trachea.)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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